Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good ideas, mediocre writing, August 29, 2007
This review is from: In at the Death (Settling Accounts, Book 4) (Hardcover)
This book both benefits from the positive aspects of the other books in this series as well as suffers from the same drawbacks. On the positive side, it is a very interesting concept with good ideas. Instead of stopping with the Civil War as most writers do, Turtledove continues to chart a course of alternate history into the present day, culminating in the rise of an American Hitler and a country split into bitter foes. Idea-wise, the book is worthy of four or five stars.
Sadly, like all of his books, this one suffers from his writing style. In a nutshell, he's incredibly repetitive. His dialogue, both internal and external, is always the same, and doesn't add anything to the book. Among the "insights" Turtledove constantly beats us over the head with are the following: Enlisted men think their officers are stupid. Soldiers hope they don't get killed. Every character is surrounded by idiots who can't understand what he's saying. No one likes black people. Everyone swears a lot. Soldiers who have sex with women in the occupied areas will get venereal disease. There's nothing wrong with these ideas in and of themselves, but every character has to think them or say them in every scene. Harry - we get it! You don't need to keep saying the same things over and over. Any time a black person says something that makes sense, the person being talked to is shocked that such a thing could happen. Countless characters blush, turn red or blink when someone says something. A typical scene goes something like this: Soldier A: "You horrible people killed all those Negroes." Soldier B: "It's not like you wanted them in the U.S.A." Then Soldier A blushes. There are about 400 scenes of someone complaining and then the person they are complaining to swearing at them and telling them they can get away with that because their side won. It's just a very unsophisticated level of discourse.
The book also seems a little unbalanced. The war ends about 2/3 of the way through and the last 200 pages are the aftermath. It seems like he's ending it too far from the climax. Yes, we want to know what happened to the characters afterwards, but this is a little much.
Overall, if you've read the other books in this series you'll have to read this one. If you haven't read any of them, and you think you can put up with the writing style, start at the beginning or this one won't make any sense.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fitting End, September 9, 2007
This review is from: In at the Death (Settling Accounts, Book 4) (Hardcover)
Through eleven volumes and nearly 100 years of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has been writing the story of a North America quite different from the one that we've lived in.
It's a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 thanks to a twist in history. In our world, just prior to the Battle of Antietam, a Union solider found a copy of General Robert E. Lee's General Order 191, which revealed the deployment plans of the Army of Northern Virginia as it moved into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Though some historians would argue the point, the discovery of those plans allowed the Union, then commanded by (the generally incompetent) George McClellan to force the Confederates into a battle at Antietam Creek that they weren't ready for. A battle which the Union won, and which became the military victory upon which Lincoln based the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the entire character of the Civil War, especially in Europe, from an internal American dispute, to a war against slavery.
In Turtledove's universe, that never happened. Instead, the Confederates scored decisive victories in Pennsylvania and, with the help of British diplomatic intervention, gained their independence.
Through ten novels, Turtledove has weaved the story of what a North America dominated by two powerful and antagonistic countries might be like. And it hasn't been a pretty story. A Second Civil War in 1880, which led both countries to seek alliances in Europe. And, when those allies went to war in the early 20th Century, the USA and CSA fought each other in a brutal war that resulted in the CSA being ground down much in the way Germany was after World War I.
In what is apparently the final volume of the series, Turtledove lays bare the consequences of the choices that his characters have made. The destruction of the Confederacy that was anticipated in the last volume becomes inevitable long before the book is over. But that's only part of the story.
The far more interesting question, which many of the characters that we've come to know only start to deal with as the book ends, is what happens next. Will the United States be forced to occupy the former CSA for decades until it finally submits ? Will the people of the CSA ever really accept responsibility for the fact that they supported a man who murdered at least eight million people ? What ever happened to the Canadian rebels ? Or the Mormons for that matter ?
Even though the book stretches more than 600 pages,many of these questions are left unanswered, leading, of course, to the obvious conclusion that there might be at least one more book in the works.
It would be nice to see those loose ends wrapped up, but, in the end, this was a satisfying end to a series resulted from, and has created, more than a few interesting alternative history scenarios.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable ending to Turtledove's longtime series, August 1, 2007
This review is from: In at the Death (Settling Accounts, Book 4) (Hardcover)
Harry Turtledove's alternate history series has a lot in common with a summer cinematic blockbuster. They come out like clockwork, offer a good deal of action, but not too much below the surface. The last volume, The Grapple (Settling Accounts, Book 3), was a particularly disappointing entry, as Turtledove seemed to have lost any interest in what was becoming a monotonous series. This, the concluding volume of his "Settling Accounts" quartet, however, is a much more enjoyable addition. Rather than stretching things out further, he wraps up his alternate Second World War between the United States and the Confederacy with a bang -- in fact, with several of them.
At the end of the last volume, the Confederacy was sliding towards what seemed an inevitable defeat, with U.S. forces striking towards Atlanta, General Sherman-style. While Turtledove picks up where he leaves off, he throws in enough twists to keep the story interesting. And though the war ends well before the last page, there is more than enough in the later chapters to satisfy readers who have followed the series from its initial volume, How Few Remain, as the postwar fates of many lasting characters are sketched out for the reader. As a result, while this volume may lack some of the imagination of his "Crosstime Traffic" series, longtime fans of the series will find little to disappoint them here.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
